Design study · City government · Minnesota
Five lakes, one chain, one connected city
A concept for a city that runs its own water, power, police, and liquor store — and publishes them as three unrelated websites.
Concept only. Facts come from the City's published sites and rate schedule; this is not the official City of Fairmont website.
- Municipal website design
- WordPress theme
- Site consolidation
- Bill estimator
- Search or Ask
- Board transparency
City of Fairmont — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Fairmont operated three separate web presences — city hall, the police department, and the municipal liquor store — which is common for a city that runs its own utilities and enterprises, and confusing for everyone else. A resident does not experience three organizations; they experience one city that is hard to search. Meanwhile the thing they most want to understand, their utility bill, is published as a rate schedule PDF that answers no actual question.
The approach
The three sites are presented as one connected system with register-switching shores, so each still reads as itself while the city reads as a whole, and a single masthead Search or Ask Fairmont box covers all three corpora at once — 175 records deep with 32 hosted city documents. The utilities page does the explanatory work a rate schedule cannot: it walks a resident from Budd Lake through the municipal plant founded in 1902 to a working bill estimator computed line by line from the city's actual 2026 rates, so the number on the bill becomes traceable rather than asserted. Thirteen boards share one consistent transparency surface instead of thirteen page layouts.
The result
Eighteen routes on a real WordPress theme unifying three previously separate sites, with search across all three corpora and a line-by-line bill estimator built on the city's real rate schedule.
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